


Sea Change

by Las, zempasuchil



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-10
Updated: 2009-03-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:36:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Las/pseuds/Las, https://archiveofourown.org/users/zempasuchil/pseuds/zempasuchil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sea change: n. A gradual transformation in which the form is retained but the substance is replaced.<br/>"Maybe when the world changes, your footholds in it do too. Maybe he's back to stumbling in a land that doesn't fit him."<br/>Peter, Susan, and Edmund from the end of the Golden Age to England, and back, and back again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea Change

 

A rock doesn't give under his touch, doesn't comment on the bruises it makes on his skin. Peter leans against it and closes his eyes; it is midsummer and, although the rock is all crags and jagged edges, it is warm against his cheek. He passes mornings admiring the play of light on its golden-green moss, stroking it occasionally and listening not to the distant sound of the river, but to the thicker silence around them.

What more constancy could he ask for in a companion? What greater solidity? When snows melt and kingdoms crumble, this glacier-boulder will be here in the stillness of the deepest woods, and even after thousands of years so will he.

He knows the land will never leave him; he just never thought that, one day, he would leave the land.

+

This is it, she thinks. The final test of growing up has her navigating the world of a child again. It is a fine joke at which Susan is determined to laugh, because the alternative is to hunker down and cover your head against providence.

“It’s a blessing, Peter,” Susan says. “Don’t you see? It’s a second chance.”

Edmund asks, “What was wrong with our first?”

There were once calluses on her hands from archery and sword fighting, but no longer. Her body remembers her training but has lost the physical conditioning, and now her muscles are weak and ache easily from exertion. It only makes her aware of the divisions between mind and body, of what the mind can control and what the body can influence. As the child-queen of a burgeoning empire, Susan had learned how to find power where no one expected to find any. She looks now at her too-small hands and her pudgy cheeks, and she thinks, I can do this. I can make them do this. Just as she had fifteen years ago.

“The key,” Edmund muses, “is not to say ‘but I am a king of Narnia’. One must say, ‘I am a king of Narnia, but’.”

Susan asks, “What if you just start a whole new sentence instead?”

+

His mother scolds him for walking with his face turned to the ground. Hold your head high like a man, she says.

Peter reckons he must. After all, there's nothing on the ground in London, with everything paved over. He spends what seems like ages stumbling over uneven cobblestones. It's not the tilt of the ground that throws him - it's the repetitiveness of the pattern, the flat greyness fractured so that you would think each step was the same but it's not.

The small stones wobble beneath him, the dirt beneath long eroded, the road insistent on maintaining its old shape over a changed land. It's a slapshod manmade ground that will not hold, and Peter would like to order it torn up. But in this world he can only bear with it and spend forever unsteady on his feet.

Sometimes Peter thinks he is like air: diffuse and insubstantial, liable to disperse because the rocks and roots and dirt no longer reach for him to anchor him to the ground. Even the air was once solid, trapped in rocks before there was any atmosphere on earth. (He learned this in school, and it didn’t surprise him as much as he would expect. He's familiar with the impermanence of form, knows that things, people, lands will change shape and never truly go back.)

You would think that it's Susan who is as steadfast as the earth, but she is more like water. She will change shape according to whatever container she is poured into.

+

Edmund likes his maths classes, and science too, when they do physics. He grapples diligently with equations and formulas and theories, enjoying the predictability of abstraction. (In his head he calculates: eleven when he became king, and twenty-six when he became eleven again, fifteen years of another life becoming zero as he tumbled out of the wardrobe. It doesn't add up.)

He figures something must remain unchanging, after all.

During class, he is told that space has three dimensions and time has one, and he argues with the professor. "Time is not a line," Edmund insists.

"Then what is it?" asks the professor, amused and haughty. "Is it a square? A triangle? Perhaps a hexagon."

But Edmund has no answer to that, so he stays quiet through his classmates' laughter and his professor's command to stay behind and clean the chalkboard after class.

+

When Peter sees the little images of them carved in the stone, he wonders that it's their youngest selves the Narnians have chosen to remember. Are they doomed to be forever children in the world?

In a thousand years of Narnia, for all that has changed, so little has as well.

"In England," Edmund says, looking out over the makeshift smithy of Aslan's How, "if we were there a thousand years ago, left, and went back now, everything - the modern world, civilization, society, technology - would all be unrecognizable. But here we are and they're still using swords and arrows. They've built a bridge over Beruna, and there are towns. But that's the work of not even a hundred years."

"Maybe if they hadn't been repressed -"

"But the Telmarines never even..."

Peter thinks of those fragments of their story, carved in the stone of the How. Persistent images of their persistent youth, of their legend still believed after a thousand years. Still relevant. Practically present.

Susan says, nearly startling him, "Why change the world that Aslan came to? Why change the methods of war when it's a war the Kings and Queens of Old can win?"

Peter says, slowly, "The past is where everything holy lives, here in Narnia. They can't afford to lose that."

But they know the myths of time: that it is steady and certain in its movement, that the past is set in stone and immutable.

It’s so easy to think you're grounded when you're in a land you know the name of, where you know your own name and so does everyone else: here he is High King Peter, and no one knows the name Pevensie. But when every step he takes toward grasping his old agency earns him heavy looks from his brother and sisters, he doesn't want to know what's happened. Maybe when the world changes, your footholds in it do too. Maybe he's back to stumbling in a land that doesn't fit him.

Peter looks to Susan and knows she isn't counting on this to be her real second chance at the world. But she doesn't misstep. She ties back her hair and shoots to kill.

+

Here, they divide the earth into strips, and in each strip it is a different time. In Australia it is tomorrow, and in America it is only this morning.

This delights Lucy when Edmund tells her. She replies, "If we keep going west fast enough, we can always stay in the same day!"

"But even if you stay in the same day, you grow old," he points out. "You can't make time stand still."

You have to move to stay still in time.

Lucy reads fairy tales, Peter reads history, and Susan reads novels, but Edmund reads science and science fiction. It isn't the same as Lucy's stories, he tells himself, because those always end happily, and aren't based on any principle of reality. There really is something out there, maybe men on Mars, and one day someone might even make his way off earth into that bigger sky. Edmund hopes so.

Lucy sees him reading "Through the Black Hole" one day and asks him what a Black Hole is.

"They're massive spots in the sky that pull everything in."

"Where does everything go?"

Edmund shrugs.

"Do you think that's what Narnia is?"

"No, that's not how -"

"Well, how do you know? You've been to Narnia, but have you ever seen a black hole?"

He shakes his head and goes back to reading his adventures of time travel and strange new planets. Edmund tells himself that it's science, not fantasy, but he knows they both read them for the same reasons.

+

During the few times he can make Susan admit she was once queen (getting rarer and rarer), Susan would say, "It's tabula rasa, Peter. Hasn't everyone wished they could go back and do things differently? We actually can. Anything is possible."

But Peter thinks maybe that's the problem. Magic, like religion, is only possible in conditions of impossibility. Of vastness. The world is becoming smaller by the day, with answers always at his fingertips and gadgets for every conceivable difficulty. A string of little miracles in lieu of one big one.

The world is on the cusp of a new era. That's what it keeps on telling itself. This obsession with being modern and technologically able, it's just the party line as the colonies break away. The war changed everything. If he were king, he wouldn't tolerate it. _If I were king_.

"You only forged an empire," says Edmund. "You never learned how to maintain one."

Peter replies, "I never had the chance."

+

At university, Peter's professor gives the assignment to pick a passage from Weber's _Economy and Society_ and critique it, and this is the passage Peter chooses:

> It appears first as ‘fate’. Among the Greeks fate (moira) is an irrational and, above all, ethically neutral predestination of the fundamental aspects of every man’s destiny. Such predetermination is elastic within certain limits, but flagrant interferences with predestined fate may be very dangerous even to the greatest of the gods. This provides one explanation for the failure of so many prayers. This kind of predestinarian view is very congenial to the normal psychological attitude of a military caste, which is particularly unreceptive to the rationalistic belief in an ethically concerned, yet impartial, wise and kindly ‘providence’. In this we glimpse once again the deep sociological distance separating a warrior class from every kind of religious or purely ethical rationalism.

  
These are his professor's comments on his essay: _Your arguments are heartfelt but, as I have written on your previous papers, therein lies the problem. A proper critique cannot be so one-sided. This reads like a journal, not an academic paper. You are doing better at supporting your arguments with concrete examples (I refer specifically to your expansion on the role of the military caste), but do cite them properly._

+

 _Were we just tools to him?_ Susan writes to him in the darkest days of winter. _It could have been anyone, couldn't it, Peter? Any two boys and any two girls. We were just playing a role, filling some slot of the myth of Narnia, and when he had no need of us he tossed us back into a world without any myth to guide us, any comprehensible plan for us that explains our lives in both worlds._

When John Pritchard down the street comes home from the war, she sees him all the next week at his window, sitting and staring out onto the street, motionless. One day it catches her, the realization: she knows what it's like to be a figure in a battle who is suddenly taken out of it, the guiding hand removed and the unspoken assumption that everything will be normal now, that home will still be there when you get back.

_There's no momentum for them, she writes. They have to pick themselves up off the ground and start anew. Something inside them has changed and the world can never understand how._

"Sometimes I think even _they_ don't understand how," Edmund says. Lucy is drawing in her sketchbook at the table, and Susan doesn't want to look because she knows it’s full of lions and fauns and tree-women.

Susan has phantom pains that she won't confess to anyone.

Peter writes back:

_We live in a world of our own imagining. It's up to us to find a Why for our lives, but we could find it anywhere, and any reason would be as good as the next as long as we truly believed it._

But she still can't reconcile everything she knows and her world feels cracked and fragmented - she will always remember that touching fabrics was the same between worlds, but the cast of the sunlight never was. That dancing barefoot could only happen there and not here. That she can live different lives in the same body and that the sea is never the same in any world, different every time she steps in it.

+

 _don't forget don't forget don't forget_ until it stops being words and is just a tight and urgent feeling in a chamber of Peter’s heart.

It resurfaces to his skin when they all go down to the beach for a weekend and Susan slips her hand into his. She grins so radiantly at the sun, wind in her hair and skirt fluttering around her legs, and he is struck by the sudden vision of the queen she was and always will be. When she pulls at his hand, he follows.

"Be careful!" their mother calls out as they race down the beach.

The jetties are slippery and the corners of the rocks are sharp, but they clamber over it all fearlessly, and Peter wonders if Susan's exuberance is her body remembering the beaches of Cair Paravel or if she is just embracing this world. She has always loved the sea. Susan cuts her foot and Peter makes her sit down while he inspects it, his hands gentle on her ankle. Let's go back and get this bandaged, he says.

"It's not that bad, Peter," she replies. "It doesn't even hurt." And she says come here. Sit by me, watch the sea.

He remembers someone telling him how, if you squint at the crests of waves, they look like white horses. The story goes that these horses are the souls of the dead, trying to return to the shores of the living. Every time they crash upon the shore, they either disappear into the sand or are pulled back into the sea. And then they try again.

That will be what he remembers of this trip: the feeling of wanting to seep into the earth, and the warmth of Susan beside him. The endless blue above and before him, and the cold winds that blow.

+

It's the latter half of summer and it gets dark earlier than it used to. Peter and Edmund ask to build a fire where the charred remains of one are half-sunk into the sand under the scorched cliff face, and after a little persistence and a little chilly breeze, their mother gives in. She warns Lucy not to go too close to the flames. Lucy makes a face and goes back to sorting her shells.

Susan sits further off on a rock, her cut wrapped in a stocking and her other foot still bare. Head bent over a book in the fading light, her hair falls down about and over her shoulders like waves, not curled tight like they're used to seeing it these days. She's softer here, by the ocean, but stronger too. She recalls a real strength to her beauty, like the hard shells that look like they're coated in liquid pearl.

Peter is prodding the fire, steadily burning now. At his mother’s behest (and to get away from it, too), Edmund goes to fetch Susan.

"Mum's worried about your eyes. Come read by the firelight," he says.

"The light's still all right over here," she says, looking at him and then at the sea.

"Is your foot all right?"

"It's only a little cut." She smiles at him, warmly, and it's as though Edmund is meeting an old friend, as if, instead of going for the handshake, she were opening her arms to him. "Come sit here by me," she says, beckoning. "This rock is warmer than the sand."

He does, placing his palms flat against the stone's surface. They sit there quiet for only a few seconds before Lucy calls, _Edmund, Susan, come have sandwiches with us or Peter and I will eat them all._

They share a secret smile as he offers her a hand up.

+

"Try him out," Peter writes from university. "I think you’d like him."

So Edmund borrows Durkheim from the library. He transcribes "How can this immutability give rise to this incessant variability?" into the back of his notebook so he'll remember to ask Peter what his professor had to say about it, and Peter writes, "He didn't say anything about it. We didn't spend too long on 'Religious Life', we mostly focused on 'Division of Labor' and it's horrid."

Edmund also copies the quote, "It is science and not religion which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand." And, "Even before his gods, a man is not always in such a marked state of inferiority."

He tells Susan about it, asks, "What do you think?"

"Oh Ed," she says, in That Tone.

Edmund underlines this whole paragraph:

> The religious life and the profane life cannot coexist in the same unit of time. There is no religion, and, consequently, no society which has not known and practiced this division of time into two distinct parts, alternating with one another according to a law varying with the peoples and the civilizations. ... Of course, it is almost impossible that the religious life should ever succeed in concentrating itself hermetically in the places and times which are thus attributed to it; it is inevitable that a little of it should filter out. There are always some sacred things outside the sanctuaries ... but these are sacred things of the second rank and rites of a lesser importance."

Edmund thinks it funny that the most succinct explanation of time is in a book about the sociology of religion and not about science or physics. He thinks his old science professor would find it funny too, though not for the same reason. People always go on about how time flies, how there’s never enough of it. That’s all rubbish. There’s always time; it just gets distributed weirdly. It sequesters itself off in a corner of the universe and, when that corner of the universe is done with it, who knows where the time goes?

Edmund can’t wrap his head around the concept of the end of time. If time flies, it certainly flies in circles. Time returns to Edmund in the form of erasure, undoing itself and undoing himself, washing his skin of Narnia’s duties and of England’s stability. You must choose one, you can’t choose neither, you especially can’t choose both, and you don’t get to keep the scars.

+

Peter keeps this quote to himself: "We are never assured of retrieving a perception in the same way we felt it the first time; for even if the thing perceived is unchanged, we ourselves are no longer the same."

He supposes Edmund and Susan already know this, but it's not just that - it's that he feels the selfish need to reassure himself of the certainty, the inevitability, of what happened. Of how nothing was the same after all. Of how he and Susan can never return.

He thinks he has a grasp on what it means to live in this world until Edmund writes him, "Despite the obvious failures, one can no longer believe that the gods will die, because they are felt to live again in the depths of one's own self."

Peter makes an involuntary noise in his throat, clenches his fist, and wishes with all his heart to be with his siblings again, not sitting in a cold university library in dim light.

+

Scraps, here and there, and, one day, while looking at pictures of sculpted nudes by the anonymous, Edmund finds the term _kairos_. A time in between, the librarian tells him, looking at him strangely over her spectacles. It doesn't lie within chronological time. It describes time in moments, moments centered around special events.

These Greek things follow him: Euclid, chronos, anthro and homo and demos. Socrates, who never wrote and took his life for the peoples' sake. Sophocles, who wrote plenty, about those who would've been better off dead.

Edmund thanks her and borrows the book of sculpture, even though its pages hold nothing more of time.

+

"It’s not just growing up", Edmund says to her one day, and she smiles because she can see how short his trousers are now that his legs have lengthened.

"No, really," he says. "You don’t grow out of yourself and shed your skin like a snake. Think about it. "

She knows he is thinking of physics and the ratio of surface-area to volume, how someone accumulates exponentially more internally than mere age can show. She knows he is thinking about circles and branches of time, but all that leaves her is in a muddy pool with ripples intersecting everywhere, everything confused from the smallest puff of air, a single drop in the ocean.

Susan doesn’t say, _It’s no use thinking about it; thinking won’t change who we are now._

Instead, she says, "We can’t just grow any way we please, you know. We need something to grow into. Some architecture to give us bearing, to hold us, and we can’t choose it like we can’t choose which world we’re living in no matter how hard we try." She remembers trying to hold water as a child; she knows better now, that water fills every crevice but can’t be held in the hands.

Edmund looks at her strangely. “Have you ever heard of kairos?” he asks. “It’s like time building on moments. Pearls have to start with a grain of sand. Something to hold on to.”

She shakes her head in answer, saying, “Some days I don’t think there’s anything I’ve held on to.”

Hand on her arm, he says her name, and around them the silence settles.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as commentfic, cracking out about Peter/rock symbolism in PC, and then somehow became the only fic either of us has written to require a bibliography.
> 
> Works Cited  
> Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. trans. Karen Fields. New York: Basic Books. 1995 [1912].  
> Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: The Free Press. 1915 [1912].  
> Max Weber. Economy and Society.


End file.
